Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

Saturday, 8 November 2014

Kuwait just joined Qataras the most talked Arab Sheikhdom in Israeli and the western Jewish media.

On July 2, 2013, The Times of Israel reported two Kuwaiti MPs, Al-Dosari and Nabil al-Fadhl in support of Kuwaiti trade with Israel especially buying arms from Israel.

On October 14, 2014, Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post claimed that the US-lead coalition against Netanyahu approved ISIS is a fraud as ISIS Sunni fighters have been found selling Shia Muslim girls to Israeli Jews.

In October 2014, Alam Alyawm daily quoting Kuwaiti Interior Ministry sources reported, there are 1,800 Jewish maids working in Kuwaiti households. Most of these maids areFalasha Jews who preferred to work in Kuwait than in anti-Black racist Israel.

On November 2, 2014, The Jerusalem Post published an article by Kuwaiti journalist Nasser Bader al-Eidan in Arabic daily Al-Rai and translated by Israeli propaganda “translation” group, the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri). The Memri’s famous translation of Ahmadinejad’s 2005 speech, which has become part of Zionist Talmud. Thus the readers of this blog have to take the Likud JP hasbara with grain of salt.

“The Kuwaiti Jews excelled in wine production before the late Sheikh Salim al-Mubarak established religious police to eradicate public drunkenness and lewdness that was common (among Muslims) those days,” said Memri.

That’s no news to westerners. Their Christian societies and family lives have long been destroyed with booze by Jewish elites.

“The Jews are masters of the whiskey trade in the United States. Eighty per cent of the members of the National Liquor Dealers’ Association are Jews. It has been shown that 60 percent of the business of distilling and wholesale trade in whiskey is in the hands of the Jews,” John Foster Fraser in his 1916 book ‘The Conquering Jew’.

“The history of Jews in Kuwait is important, but most of our generation knows nothing about it, and our textbooks ignore it. It’s part of Kuwait’s modern history, whether we like it or not, due to Jewish contributions to trade and art, and scientific integrity requires us to document it,” said Memri.

The dude at the Memri is blaming Kuwaitis for the historic distortion as the Israeli Zionist historians did to Palestine history.

As for the claim of “Jewish contribution” to Kuwait’s modern history, it is ridiculous considering Kuwait until WW I was “Qadha”, a district within the Basra Province, and it was an integral part of Iraq under the administrative rule of the Ottoman Empire. No doubt Iraqi Jews were prominent in Iraqi trade as they were favored by Ottoman over Arabs.

Naeim Giladi – 11-07-94 Original air date

Naeim Giladi (Hebrew: נעים גלעדי‎) (born 1929, Iraq, as Naeim Khalaschi) is an Anti-Zionist, and author of an autobiographical article and historical analysis entitled The Jews of Iraq.[1] The article later formed the basis for his originally self-published book Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.

Haifa-born Eldad Beck, a dual citizen, used his German passport to infiltrate in Kuwait, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Qatar, Pakistan and Afghanistan under the cover of a Christian journalist from German while writing anti-Muslim crap for Israeli newspaperYedioth Ahronoth.

Using Jewish “achievements” around the world with the Zionist entity is not a new thing. For example, David Brook in an Op-Ed at the Jew York Times (January 12, 2012) made a similar claim. Last year, US vice-President Joe Biden claimed that American heritage is Jewish.

Police shot dead a young Palestinian with Israeli citizenship during an attempted arrest Saturday, threatening to inflame Palestinian anger as the top EU diplomat pushed for progress on the political front.

The dawn killing in Kfar Kana in northern Occupied Palestine comes against a backdrop of soaring Israeli-Palestinian tensions in annexed East Jerusalem where there have been near-daily clashes.

The 22-year-old intervened in the arrest of one of his relatives, threatening the officers with a knife, the Israeli police statement claimed.

The police shot him and he died on the way to hospital, it said.

Dozens of angry youths later erected barricades and set fire to tires on the outskirts of the village as police deployed reinforcements. According to Ma’an news agency, locals in the village announced a general strike in protest against the killing.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, who account for about 20 percent of the population in Occupied Palestine, are the descendents of Palestinian who remained on their land when the Zionist state was established in 1948. The majority of Palestinians were killed, expelled from their homes, or detained in work camps.

Palestinians with Israeli citizenship complain of routine discrimination, particularly in housing, land access and employment, and anger has risen in recent months over Israel’s assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 dead. More than 700 Palestinians in Israel were arrested in protests across the country against the attack over summer.

The shooting came after another night of clashes in occupied East Jerusalem as Israeli forces used rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas against youths throwing stones and firecrackers.

The violence was particularly intense at the Shuafat refugee camp, a maze of alleys crammed with Palestinian homes along the apartheid wall cutting off East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank.

Community officials say the wave of unrest is fueled by a sense of hopelessness in East Jerusalem because of Israeli policies and the impunity of settlers and security forces who regularly attack Palestinians.

The anger has been further provoked by the relentless rise of Israel’s illegal settlement activities as well as efforts by far-right Zionist groups to secure prayer rights at the al-Aqsa mosque compound.

Speaking on her first official visit to Jerusalem, the European Union’s new foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini said there was a real “urgency” to pick up and advance the moribund peace process.

“The risk is that if we do not move forward on the political track, we will go back… again to violence,” she told reporters.

But she also flagged up Israel’s settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as an “obstacle” to a negotiated peace. The settlements are deemed illegal under international law.

“I reject the fictitious claim that the root of the continuous conflict is this or that settlement,” he said.

“Jerusalem is our capital and as such is not a settlement.”

Netanyahu ordered the security forces to either seal or demolish the homes of any Palestinian involved in anti-Israeli attacks, an official said Friday.

Mogherini was due to meet officials from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza on Saturday.

She had also been scheduled to meet Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah but he cancelled his trip there after a series of bombs Friday hit the homes and cars of Gaza-based officials with the Fatah movement.

Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, laid the blame on the Hamas movement, the ruling party in Gaza, as a new row broke out between the rival Palestinian factions.

Israel launched a brutal 50-day assault on Gaza earlier this year which resulted in the deaths of 2,140 Palestinians, more than 70 percent of them civilians, and 73 Israelis, 68 of them soldiers, and destroyed swathes of the Gaza strip.

Hamas announced Friday it was forming a thousands-strong “popular army” in the devastated Gaza Strip in response to what it called “serious Israeli violations” at al-Aqsa.

Frequent clashes occur around the compound between Israeli forces, who routinely restrict Palestinian access to the mosque, and protesters.

Remember the time when Libya was being held up by the American, British, French and Qatari governments as a striking example of benign and successful foreign intervention? It is worth looking again at film of David Cameron grandstanding as liberator in Benghazi in September 2011 as he applauds the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and tells the crowd that

“your city was an example to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom”.

Mr Cameron has not been back to Benghazi, nor is he likely to do so as warring militias reduce Libya to primal anarchy in which nobody is safe. The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse off today than they were under Gaddafi, notwithstanding his personality cult and authoritarian rule. The slaughter is getting worse by the month and is engulfing the entire country.

“Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your democracy,” pledged Mr Cameron to the people of Benghazi.

Three years later, they are words he evidently wants to forget, since there was almost no reference to Libya, the one military intervention he had previously ordered, when he spoke in the House of Commons justifying British airstrikes against Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq.

The foreign media has largely ceased to cover Libya because it rightly believes it is too dangerous for journalists to go there. Yet I remember a moment in the early summer of 2011 in the frontline south of Benghazi when there were more reporters and camera crews present than there were rebel militiamen. Cameramen used to ask fellow foreign journalists to move aside when they were filming so that this did not become too apparent. In reality, Gaddafi’s overthrow was very much Nato’s doing, with Libyan militiamen mopping up.

Human rights organisations have had a much better record in Libya than the media since the start of the uprising in 2011.

They discovered that there was no evidence for several highly publicised atrocities supposedly carried out by Gaddafi’s forces that were used to fuel popular support for the air war in the US, Britain, France and elsewhere.

These included the story of the mass rape of women by Gaddafi’s troops that Amnesty International exposed as being without foundation. The uniformed bodies of government soldiers were described by rebel spokesmen as being men shot because they were about to defect to the opposition. Video film showed the soldiers still alive as rebel prisoners so it must have been the rebels who had executed them and put the blame on the government.

Foreign governments and media alike have good reason to forget what they said and did in Libya in 2011, because the aftermath of the overthrow of Gaddafi has been so appalling. The extent of the calamity is made clear by two reports on the present state of the country, one by Amnesty International called “Libya: Rule of the gun – abductions, torture and other militia abuses in western Libya” and a second by Human Rights Watch, focusing on the east of the country, called “Libya: Assassinations May Be Crimes Against Humanity”.

The latter is a gruesome but fascinating account of what people in Benghazi call “Black Friday,” which occurred on 19 September this year, the most deadly day in a three-day assassination spree in the city, in which “the dead included two young activists, members of the security services, an outspoken cleric and five other civilians”.

The activists were Tawfiq Bensaud and Sami Elkawafi, two men aged 18 and 19, who had campaigned and demonstrated against militia violence. Among others who died was a prominent cleric, Seikh Nabil Sati, who was murdered, as well as a young man, Abdulrahman al-Mogherbi, who was kidnapped at the cleric’s funeral and later found dead.

Their murders brought to 250 the number of victims of politically motivated killings this year in Benghazi and Derna, the major cities in eastern Libya. This is not counting the far larger number who have died in military operations between the different militias or the battles that have raged in and around Tripoli.

Without the rest of the world paying much attention, a civil war has been raging in western Libya since 13 July between the Libya Dawn coalition of militias, originally based in Misrata, and another militia group centred on Zintan. A largely separate civil war between the forces of retired General Khalifa Haftar and the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries is being fought out in the city. Government has collapsed. Amnesty says that torture has become commonplace with victims being “beaten with plastic tubes, sticks, metal bars or cables, given electric shocks, suspended in stress positions for hours, kept blindfolded and shackled for days.”

Libyan troops clash with Islamic extremists in Benghazi last week

It is easy enough to deride the neo-imperial posturing of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, or to describe the abyss into which Libya has fallen since 2011. The people whom that intervention propelled into power have reduced a country that had been peaceful for more than half a century to a level of violence that is beginning to approach that of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever Western intentions, the result has been a disaster. In Libya, as in Syria today, Western intervention was supposedly in support of democracy, but was conducted in alliance with the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Gulf who had no such aims.

The temptation is to say that foreign intervention invariably brings catastrophe to the country intervened in. But this is not quite true: US air strikes in defence of the Syrian Kurds at Kobani and the Iraqi Kurds in their capital Erbil are justifiable and prevent massacres by Isis. But the drawback is that foreign intervention is always in the interests of the country intervening. These may, for a time, coincide with the real interests of the country where the foreign intervention is taking place, but this seldom lasts very long.

This is the lesson of recent foreign interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Most Afghans wanted the Taliban out in 2001 but they did not want the warlords back, something the Americans found acceptable. The US would fight the Taliban, but not confront the movement’s sponsors in Pakistan, thereby dooming Afghanistan to endless war. In Iraq in 2003, many Iraqis welcomed the US-led invasion because they wanted the end of Saddam Hussein’s rule, but they did not want a foreign occupation. The Americans did not want the fall of Saddam to benefit Iran, so they needed to occupy the country and install their own nominees in power.

In all three cases cited above, the West intervened in somebody else’s civil war and tried to dictate who won. There was a pretence that the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad were demonically evil and without any true supporters. This foreign support may give victory to one party in a civil war, as in Libya, which they could not win by relying on their own strength. In Iraq, the beleaguered Sunni could not fight a US-backed Shia government so it needed to bring in al-Qaeda. Thus the conditions were created that eventually produced Isis.

Barack Obama, in his post-election press conference yesterday, announced that he would seek an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from the new Congress, one that would authorize Obama’s bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria—the one he began three months ago. If one were being generous, one could say that seeking congressional authorization for a war that commenced months ago is at least better than fighting a war even after Congress explicitly rejected its authorization, as Obama lawlessly did in thenow-collapsed country of Libya.

When Obama began bombing targets inside Syria in September, I noted that it was the seventh predominantly Muslim country that had been bombed by the U.S. during his presidency (that did not count Obama’s bombing of the Muslim minority in the Philippines). I also previously noted that this new bombing campaign meant that Obama had become the fourth consecutive U.S. President to order bombs dropped on Iraq. Standing alone, those are both amazingly revealing facts. American violence is so ongoing and continuous that we barely notice it any more. Just this week, a U.S. drone launched a missile that killed 10 people in Yemen, and the dead were promptly labeled “suspected militants” (which actually just means they are “military-age males”); those killings received almost no discussion.

To get a full scope of American violence in the world, it is worth asking a broader question: how many countries in the Islamic world has the U.S. bombed or occupied since 1980? That answer was provided in a recent Washington Post op-ed by the military historian and former U.S. Army Col. Andrew Bacevich:

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extent into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.

Bacevich’s count excludes the bombing and occupation of still other predominantly Muslim countries by key U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, carried out with crucial American support. It excludes coups against democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of people with no charges. It also, of course, excludes all the other bombing and invading and occupying that the U.S. has carried out during this time period in other parts of the world, including in CentralAmericaand the Caribbean, as well asvarious proxy wars in Africa.

There is an awful lot to be said about the factions in the west which devote huge amounts of their time and attention to preaching against the supreme primitiveness and violence of Muslims. There are no gay bars in Gaza, the obsessively anti-Islam polemicists proclaim—as though that (rather than levels of violence and aggression unleashed against the world) is the most important metric for judging a society. Reflecting their single-minded obsession with demonizing Muslims (at exactly the same time, coincidentally, their governments wage a never-ending war on Muslim countries and theirsocieties marginalize Muslims), they notably neglect to note thriving gay communities in places like Beirut andIstanbul, or the lack of them in Christian Uganda. Employing the defining tactic of bigotry, they love to highlight the worst behavior of individual Muslims as a means of attributing it to the group as a whole, while ignoring (often expressly) the worst behavior of individual Jews and/or their own groups (they similarly cite the most extreme precepts of Islam while ignoring similarly extreme ones from Judaism). That’s because, as Rula Jebreal told Bill Maher last week, if these oh-so-brave rationality warriors said about Jews what they say about Muslims, they’d be fired.

But of all the various points to make about this group, this is always the most astounding: those same people, who love to denounce the violence of Islam as some sort of ultimate threat, live in countries whose governments unleash far more violence, bombing, invasions, and occupations than anyone else by far. That is just a fact.

Those who sit around in the U.S. or the U.K. endlessly inveighing against the evil of Islam, depicting it as the root of violence and evil (the “mother lode of bad ideas“), while spending very little time on their own societies’ addictions to violence and aggression, or their own religious and nationalistic drives, have reached the peak of self-blinding tribalism. They really are akin to having a neighbor down the street who constantly murders, steals and pillages, and then spends his spare time flamboyantly denouncing people who live thousands of miles away for their bad acts. Such a person would be regarded as pathologically self-deluded, a term that also describes those political and intellectual factions which replicate that behavior.

The sheer casualness with which Obama yesterday called for a new AUMF is reflective of how central, how commonplace, violence and militarism are in the U.S.’s imperial management of the world. That some citizens of that same country devote themselves primarily if not exclusively to denouncing the violence and savagery of othersis a testament to how powerful and self-blinding tribalism is as a human drive.

A handout picture released on November 3, 2014 the Egyptian Presidency shows Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi giving a speech as he attends the Air Force exercises as part of Badr 2014 Strategic Maneuver in Cairo. AFP/Egyptian Presidency

It seems clear that the ties between Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), with the exception of Qatar, are evolving dramatically in economic and military matters, at a time when the unrest in Yemen and Egyptian concerns over the continued chaos in Libya are leading to a profound military cooperation between the two sides.

Cairo – An Associated Press report published earlier this week, quoting Egyptian and Gulf officials, said that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait were discussing the creation of a military pact to take on extremists in the region, particularly in Libya and Yemen, with the possibility of creating a joint force to intervene around the Middle East. The report said this alliance would operate separately from the anti-ISIS coalition led by the United States.

Certainly, such an alliance would stand to bring a number of gains, especially for Egypt. For instance, Saudi Arabia will be funding arm deals on behalf of Egypt, reportedly including those signed with Moscow. This is while other Gulf countries have expressed their willingness to help finance deals for arms and fuel, which Egypt has to import.

So far, there has been no formal declaration regarding the nature of this alliance, but there are reports indicating the idea follows a meeting between the military leaders of the international anti-ISIS coalition in Washington in mid-October.

“The Egyptian-Gulf alliance is part of the attempt to rein in extremist forces in the region.” – Major General Ahmed Abdul-Hakim, military expert

Despite the fogginess of the information available regarding the required contribution of each country in the alliance in question, the chief of staff of the Egyptian army, General Mahmoud Hijazi, is said to have put the matter forward to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. According to Egyptian sources, there are extensive discussions regarding its feasibility.

Sources close to the Egyptian presidency said that the alliance would see the expansion of joint military exercises, with Saudi and Emirati forces training in Egypt in the coming period. The sources said the alliance would then be operationalized to tackle insurgent groups in Yemen or carry out strikes in Libya, pointing out that there are grave concerns in the Gulf regarding possible threats from Yemen and Iraq.

The same sources said the UAE and Saudi Arabia would fully fund the operations, while Egypt would provide logistical support. However, the sources discounted direct ground operations in the first few months of the formation of the presumed structure.

There are indications Egyptian military airports in western Egypt could be used to launch air strikes in Libyan territory when needed, carried out by Egyptian, Saudi, and Emirati warplanes in coordination between the commands of the three armies.

Logistically speaking, the Egyptian army cannot at the present time participate in any ground force aiming to carry out external operations, with the exception of its peacekeeping roles around the world, though these involve no more than a few hundred troops. Another issue is the stigma the Egyptian public associates with its army’s participation in the Kuwait liberation war in 1991, and the precarious internal fronts the army is operating along. President Sisi is aware of the implications of the sensitive phase the Egyptian army is currently undergoing, but at the same time, he has a desire to assert Egyptian influence in the Arab region.

Speaking to Al-Akhbar, Egyptian security expert Major General Mahmoud Abdel-Aal said, “Talk about forming an Egyptian-Gulf military alliance is natural, given the challenges the Arab countries face from extremist elements, and the chaos that foreign powers seek to spread in several Arab countries under the name of the Arab Spring.” “The Libyan experience in change has taken the country into a spiral whose final features would not become clear for many years to come,” he added.

For his part, military expert Major General Ahmed Abdul-Hakim said, “The military strategy followed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi does not allow implicating the army in any battles that would cause losses to the Egyptian forces,” and added, “The Egyptian-Gulf alliance is part of the attempt to rein in extremist forces in the region.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with by phone with Jordan's King Abdullah II to reassure him that he would not allow Jews to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque.

"I spoke today to King Abdullah of Jordan and we agreed that we will make every effort to calm the situation," Netanyahu said.

"I explained to him that we're keeping the status quo on the Temple Mount and that this includes Jordan's traditional role there," he said, using Israel's name for the holy mosque.

Under the current status quo, Jews are permitted to visit the esplanade but not to pray there for fear it would cause friction at the third holiest site for Muslims.

King Abdullah "recalled that Jordan firmly rejected any measure undermining the sanctity of the Al-Aqsa mosque", a palace statement said.

Jordan's status as custodian of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and other Muslim holy sites in annexed east Jerusalem is enshrined in the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries.

Concerns that Israel was set to legislate changes to the status quo have sparked weeks of unrest at the site, with Zionist extremists have been staging marches in which they call for praying in al-Aqsa Mosque.

Jordan, Palestine Complaint to UNSC over Israeli Violations

Earlier on Wednesday, Palestinians and Jordanians have urged the UN Security Council to demand that Israel immediately stop provocations and incitement against Muslim holy sites in al-Quds, warning that further escalation could lead to another crisis threatening peace in the Middle East.

Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour said the "actions blatantly intended to assert Israeli control over the Mosque continue unabated'.'

Mansour said in a letter to the Security Council that stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets were fired early on Wednesday at Palestinian worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, seriously injuring at least 30 people.

Jordan's UN Ambassador Dina Kawar said in a separate letter to the council that Israeli special forces and police prohibited Muslim worshippers from entering and allowed religious and political extremists inside the holy mosque.

"This blatant and unlawful use of force against one of the holiest sites on earth for Muslims have resulted in fires breaking out, damage to mosaic works on ceilings and to the structure of the building, burning of the carpets and rugs and damage to other facilities,'' she said.

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah earlier on Tuesday warned against the Israeli agression and juddaization in the holy city of al-Quds.

During his speech on the tenth day of Muharram, the Lebanese resistance leader urged both Arab and Muslim nation to stand by the Palestinian people and save al-Aqsa Mosque which "is in real danger."